Thelonious Monk had much to celebrate on October 10, 1957. It was his fortieth birthday, and after more than two decades of scuffling his career was on an upswing. He had a regular engagement at the Five Spot Café in New York City—his first steady gig in several years. When he opened there three months earlier, Monk had just begun to emerge from relative obscurity. Now he was the jazz world’s hottest ticket, and the small East Village bar had become one of the hippest joints in the city. Adoring fans, hipsters, bohemians, and wannabes lined up outside the narrow storefront club at 5 Cooper Square, hoping to catch Monk and his legendary quartet—John Coltrane, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and drummer Shadow Wilson. That night, Monk wanted to celebrate. Friends, family, and enthusiastic fans surrounded him. His “ ‘un’ years,” as his wife Nellie used to call them, were about to end.1
Further uptown, on West 56th Street near Fifth Avenue, another Monk—Julius Withers Monk—also had something to celebrate. On that same Thursday night, Julius Monk’s latest opus, a musical comedy revue entitled “Take Five,” opened at Upstairs at the Downstairs, to excellent reviews. Known to the entertainment world as a fine pianist, satirist, male model, producer, and a bit of an eccentric, Julius Monk had worked at the famed #1 Fifth Avenue Bar during the 1930s and gigged in France before becoming musical director of Le Ruban Bleu, a popular supper club, in 1943. In the 1950s, he founded the Downstairs Room and subsequently launched Upstairs at the Downstairs as a combination theater/supper club where he produced several acclaimed comic revues.2
Thelonious and Julius probably knew of each other. In every issue of the directory for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Thelonious’s name followed Julius’s in the listing of pianists.3 They shared a lot more than the piano, the union, a reputation for eccentricity, Latinate first names, and the same surname. Both hailed from North Carolina—Julius from Salisbury in Rowan County (he was born in 1912), Thelonious from Rocky Mount in Edgecombe County (born in 1917). Their geographical origins are not accidental: a century earlier, Julius’s great-grandfather, Archibald Monk, had enslaved Thelonious’s great-grandfather, John Jack Monk.4
Julius Withers Monk took great interest in studying his family’s past. During the 1940s, he conducted extensive genealogical research and even commissioned a scholar to produce a detailed family tree of the Monks.5 Yet he was only interested in the Monks who looked like him, not the nineteen slaves his great-granddaddy owned in 1860.6 Had he known this history, he might have been inspired to head down to the Five Spot after his show and thank Thelonious personally for the privileged life he was able to enjoy. The scion of one of Salisbury’s wealthiest landowners, Dr. Lawrence Monk, Sr., Julius grew up in a well-to-do family and attended the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and the Cincinnati Conservatory.7 Julius’s excellent musical education, like his father’s and brother’s medical school education, was partly paid for with inherited wealth, the source of which turned out to be the sweat and toil of John Jack Monk and the other African-descended people held in bondage.
While Julius grew up in affluence, Thelonious had been born into extreme poverty. His mother and grandmother spent their lives scrubbing floors for a living, and his father, Thelonious, Sr., cobbled together work as an unskilled day laborer in the railroad town of Rocky Mount. His grandfathers had lived a life of debt peonage, sharecropping for ex-slave masters and surviving pretty much from meal to meal. Yet Monk inherited more than poverty. His family passed down a rich cultural, intellectual, and political legacy—a legacy that shaped his music and his worldview in both profound and subtle ways.
The vestiges of slavery were everywhere in the Jim Crow South. More important than the memory of slavery, however, was the memory of freedom. The two generations that preceded Thelonious’s lived through one of the greatest revolutions and counterrevolutions in the history of the modern world. Thelonious, his sister Marion, and brother Thomas were raised by people for whom freedom had tangible meaning. They heard first-hand stories of emancipation from their parents; stories of black men going to the polls and running for office, of former slaves founding churches and schools, and helping to build a new democracy in the Southern states. For any Southern black person living between 1865 and 1900, freedom wasn’t a word taken for granted or used abstractly. As Thelonious’s parents in turn passed to him, freedom meant more than breaking the “rules” of musical harmony or bending tempos. His grandparents were part of freedom’s first generation of African-Americans, a generation that could dream of a good life under a hopeful democracy. Yet his parents watched that democracy—and their freedom—burn, sometimes literally, under assault by white supremacists as Jim Crow laws descended across the South. The disfranchisement of black folk and the restoration of power to the old planter class was rapid and violent. Like many families, the Monks never lost their memory of post–Civil War freedom, or their determination to possess it once again.
Thelonious Monk’s music is essentially about freedom. He inherited much from those who came before him: not least a deeply felt understanding of freedom. His story begins with their song.
• • •
Monk’s ancestors came from West Africa. The majority of slave imports into North Carolina did not come by sea directly from the African continent. Most came over land, either from South Carolina or across the northern border from Virginia. The first slaves brought to North Carolina, during the earliest days of the colony, came mostly from Barbados along with their owners. Cultural affinities and practices can help point to the African ethnic origins of slaves, but not enough is known about Monk’s earliest ancestors to even speculate.8
We do know that all of Thelonious’s people on both his mother’s and father’s sides ended up bound to plantations on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina, a region renowned for its dark, rich, alluvial soil, its many rivers and tributaries, and a flat landscape as far as the eye can see. Cotton was king during the antebellum period, but its domain wasn’t vast; much of the arable land in the region was used for tobacco, sweet potatoes, Indian corn, and beans. Livestock, especially pigs, was abundant.
Monk’s father’s people lived on both sides of the border dividing Johnston and Sampson counties. His great-grandfather, John Jack or just “Jack,” was born around 1797, and it is quite possible that he was born free in West Africa.9 In 1835, he became the property of Archibald Monk, through Monk’s wife, Harriet. Harriet Monk inherited John Jack from her father, Aaron Hargrove, another prominent Sampson County planter. Eight years earlier, Hargove had given John Jack’s first-born daughter, Chaney, to Harriet as a gift. Chaney was only nine years old at the time.10 With John Jack and Chaney reunited, they, too, became “Monks,” as did all the other slaves on Archibald’s Newton Grove plantation.
Archibald Monk himself was never much of a planter; his heart was in sales, and in political power. Born in Sampson County around 1789, he grew up to become one of North Carolina’s most prominent citizens. During the early 1820s he resided in Fayetteville and co-owned a successful dry-goods store on Hay Street. It wasn’t until after he married Harriet Hargrove in 1824 that he returned to the northern district of Sampson County and took up a life as a plantation-owner and public figure.11
The official Monk family history leaves out one crucial story popular among the black side of the Monk clan. Around 1825 or ’26—very soon after his marriage—Archibald’s house slave, reputedly a beautiful young woman of mixed Indian and African heritage, bore him twin sons, Solomon and Kaplin.12 He was still living in Fayetteville. Archibald caused quite a stir among the city fathers by bringing his mulatto children to the local Presbyterian church with him. According to the black Monk family lore, the congregation banned Archibald from coming to church, and he decided right then and there to establish his own church on his plantation where the white Monks worshipped alongside their slaves. His son, Dr. John Carr Monk, apparently inherited his father’s belief that the Lord’s House knows no color line (except perhaps between the floor and the gallery). Before the Civil War, John and his wife, Anne Eason Monk, attended a Methodist church in Sampson County known for admitting slaves in the galleries. They were there to mind the white children, although they were encouraged to worship. After the war, Dr. Monk was a lone dissenting voice against segregated churches for free black people. Not to be deterred, in the 1870s he converted to Catholicism, to the chagrin of his fellow white Protestant neighbors, and deeded a parcel of his land in Westbrook Township to establish “a colored school,” with religious instruction being first and foremost.13
Even when they worshipped together, antebellum blacks and whites didn’t worship the same things. Enslaved black people didn’t take much stock in “massa’s” God. They created their own version of Christianity and generally preferred to worship in the woods, in their poorly constructed cabins, anywhere beyond the seeing eyes of the white folks. Their sacred songs and prayers often spoke of freedom and justice, of a promised land without the lash or without toil from sunup to sundown. Their God could be forgiving, filling the master’s heart with kindness; or redemptive, turning his wrath on those who continue to hold God’s chosen people in Egyptland and smiting their first-born dead. Thelonious would imbibe African-American theology from this tradition, decades later.
Meanwhile the white Monks, Archibald and John, saw nothing wrong with holding other Christians in bondage, and they made a lot of money doing so. On the eve of the Civil War, Archibald Monk owned nineteen slaves and real estate valued at $10,000. Overall, his personal estate was worth $21,179, quite respectable in those days.14
John Jack was the oldest slave on the Monk plantation. By 1850, he was fifty-three years old and had already fathered three children, George, Isaac, and Richard, with the woman to whom he was probably married. (Slave marriages were not legally recognized, but the bonds among enslaved black people were just as deep, if not deeper, than marriage bonds recognized by the state.) She was a slave on the Monk plantation. Her name, unfortunately, is unknown, and she died before 1850. Jack subsequently married a slave on the Willis Cole plantation located in nearby Bentonville, just over the Johnston County line. Because of their proximity, slaves on the Cole and the Monk plantations had a history of social interaction. Several of the Monk slaves were wedded to Coles.15
We know almost nothing about “Mother Cole” except that she was part Tuscarora Indian, and proud of it. Before European colonialism, the Tuscarora occupied much of eastern North Carolina, including the coast. Between 1711–1715, the Tuscarora declared war on white settlers who were encroaching on their hunting grounds, but they were militarily decimated. Hundreds were enslaved and sold to English planters in the Caribbean. By 1754, barely 300 Tuscarora were left in the state.16
Though elderly by antebellum standards, John Jack and “Mother Cole” managed to have one child, Hinton, born on February 12, 1852.17 Hinton was Thelonious, Jr.’s grandfather. Raised by his mother and other members of his extended family on the Willis Cole plantation, he spent the first thirteen years of his life in slavery. Cole’s plantation wasn’t huge, about 300 acres. If Hinton was anything like most slave children, by the time he was eight he was probably milking Cole’s four cows, tending to the twenty-eight pigs, possibly digging up sweet potatoes, toting water to field hands, helping in the kitchen, and caring for infants. He was surrounded by other children; according to the 1860 Census, of the twenty Africans Willis Cole held in bondage, twelve were thirteen and younger.18
As Union armies marched south in the Civil War, they were confronted with waves of black men, women, and children, folks who boldly emancipated themselves with the hope that the men in blue would protect them from “massa” and the heartless “paddy rollers” (patrollers). The federal government and military called these escaped slaves “contraband,” since they knew that seizing slaves, along with livestock and land, was the best way to destroy the Confederacy. But these black folk were more than contraband; they were volunteer soldiers; they were the hewers of wood and toters of water who sustained the Union army in its march to the sea; and they were candidates for citizenship in the post-war democracy.19
Willis Cole’s “Negroes” were no different from other enslaved people caught in the whirlwind of this reluctant revolution. They traded tales of the Union army’s invasion and spoke in hushed tones about President Lincoln’s Proclamation that on January 1, 1863, all the black folk held as slaves in the rebellious states were henceforth free. That fateful day came and went, but nothing happened in Bentonville—no Union forces, no Lincoln, no mass exodus, no hand of God. When Hinton turned nine the following month, he was still a slave on the Cole plantation. And when the Union forces finally did arrive in Bentonville in March 1865, the Willis Cole plantation became the site of one of the most important battles in Civil War history. The Battle of Bentonville was not only the last Confederate victory of the war, it proved to be the largest military conflict ever fought on North Carolina soil, involving some 85,000 troops. It was the South’s last hurrah, for once General Sherman dispatched reinforcements the Confederates withdrew. Cole had turned over his house to Confederate commanders, and he likely fled, with his twenty slaves, to Fayetteville, where most eastern North Carolina planters took refuge.20
A month after the Battle of Bentonville, and two weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston officially surrendered to General Sherman, ending both the Civil War and slavery in the state of North Carolina. For black folks it was Jubilee; for local whites, primarily those whose way of life depended on unpaid black labor, it was Armageddon. Not every planter accepted the news that all slaves were to be emancipated. Throughout the summer and fall of 1865, there were hundreds of reported incidents of African-Americans still being held in bondage. The cultural landscape for both white and black Monks changed dramatically nonetheless. A new group of black leaders emerged out of the war, many of whom fought for the Union army and saw themselves as liberators. They raised money to build churches and schools, to hire teachers, and to purchase land. Some former slaves assumed that the land of their former masters now belonged to them. Indeed, there had been some wartime distribution of land by the Union army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau promised to settle former slaves on plots of their own. Not all former slaves were so bold. Tens of thousands throughout the state stuck close to their old plantations, afraid of starvation and severing deep family ties in the community. But even these families were vulnerable; there were many incidents of planters evicting their former slaves, especially those too old or weak to work.21
Despite these initial setbacks, black people were determined to own land, to enjoy citizenship, to exercise political power, and to live in a South where everyone would be free and equal. They remained optimistic because of the presence of federal troops and institutions such as the Freedmen’s Bureau. But once Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president following Lincoln’s assassination, he made his position clear: America is a “white man’s nation” and white men shall rule the South. Throughout 1866, President Johnson appointed avid racists to positions of power in the Southern Provisional government. They, in turn, disarmed the majority of black federal troops while white planters formed armed terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. In 1866, white supremacists in government passed a series of laws known as the Black Codes. The North Carolina Black Codes restricted freedom of movement of blacks, the amount of land they could own, whom they could marry (interracial marriages were outlawed), and their right to bear arms. Some of the most draconian Black Codes were the apprenticeship laws, which allowed former masters to retain control of ex-slaves under the age of twenty-one, under the pretext that they needed a guardian. Abuse of apprenticeship was rampant throughout the state, especially in Sampson County.22
Hinton, Thelonious’s grandfather, who turned thirteen in the year of Jubilee, was ripe for such abuse. Both of his parents died, either during the war or immediately thereafter. Fortunately, Hinton’s half-brother Levin Cole and his wife, Harriet, took him in. He earned his keep as a farmhand, and learned to read and write.23 Literacy was a precious thing, especially for black people in a state where it had been a crime to teach slaves to read and write and where free blacks had been prohibited from attending public schools.
By the end of the 1860s, the prevailing political culture turned yet again. Radical Republicans in Congress overturned President Johnson’s weak Reconstruction policies and passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, granting black people citizenship and male suffrage, respectively. These so-called Civil War amendments marked a profound shift in constitutional history, and for a time they appeared to make the new freedom a sure thing. Former slaves not only began to vote, they ran for office and held positions in the state legislature, Congress, and even the Senate. And they insisted that free universal public education was a pillar of democracy.
For Hinton’s generation, reading and writing were revolutionary acts in revolutionary times. He came of age when proud and eloquent black legislators, most of whom came up as slaves in eastern North Carolina, demanded equality under the law, the right of black people to serve on juries, a ten-hour work day, even woman’s suffrage. Yet he also witnessed a reign of terror descend upon North Carolina Republicans and black voters. Through violence and intimidation, Democrats succeeded in impeaching and removing the Republican governor in 1871 and regaining control of the state legislature. Four years later, they held a constitutional convention that amended the elective county government system (mostly by gerrymandering) in order to reduce black voting power in the eastern counties. The Democrats campaigned for the amendment on overtly racial terms, arguing that allowing black majority districts was tantamount to “White Slavery in North Carolina—Degradation Worse Then Death.”24 White supremacy was given a boost during the 1876 presidential contest between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes. Tilden had won the popular vote, but both sides claimed electoral-college victory in three key states. A commission was appointed to decide the dispute and an informal compromise was struck: the Democrats were willing to cede the White House to Republican Hayes in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, thus removing the last vestiges of Reconstruction.
As the post-war battle in North Carolina swung from extreme to extreme, Hinton reacted like the majority of freed people, becoming a sharecropper on John Carr Monk’s land. After emancipation, Levin and Harriet Cole chose not to return to Willis Cole’s place. Instead, they moved just across the county line to Newton Grove, where they worked for Monk. Hinton, working alongside his eldest brother, had returned to the same land that his daddy, John Jack, worked a generation earlier. As a free man faced with the responsibility of choosing a surname, Hinton continued to use his mother’s name, “Cole.”25
Hinton Cole proposed to a beautiful and intelligent young woman named Sarah Ann Williams some time between 1875 and 1877. Born on August 3, 1856, Sarah Ann was the eldest daughter of Friday Williams, the former slave and “mulatto” son of Blaney Williams, one of Newton Grove’s richest and most prominent planters. At the time of his death in 1852, Williams owned 1,875 acres in Newton Grove, 475 acres in Duplin County, 442 acres in Greene County, and at least forty-eight slaves.26 In 1870, Friday Williams, his second wife, Eliza, and their then eight children were renting land from Blaney’s son, George Robert Williams. When Hinton and Sarah Ann met, they were practically neighbors. Ten years later, Friday’s family and Hinton and Sarah Ann Cole were all working land owned by John Carr Monk’s widow, Anne Eason Monk, and their children (Dr. Monk died in 1877).27
Like most first-generation free black Southerners, Hinton and Sarah Cole were forced into the precarious life of sharecropping. Every season they struggled to make ends meet, and still managed to raise ten children. Thelonious was the seventh in line, born in 1889.28 At some point between 1890 and 1900, the entire family relocated to Wayne County, just east of Sampson County.29 And yet, as residents of eastern North Carolina, they had reason to be hopeful. In 1892, while the rest of the South succumbed to white supremacy, a fusion ticket of Republicans and Populists defeated racist Democrats, winning the majority of state house and senate seats, electing dozens of African-Americans to local offices, and sending a black man, George H. White, to Congress four years later. Such interracial unity was short-lived. An appeal to white racial fears was all it took to destroy it.30
By the 1898 elections, Democrats swept back to power, with help from white Populists who traded interracial unity for white supremacy. And in the majority-black city of Wilmington, where Democrats could not win by vote, they took up arms and overthrew the elected government, killing scores of African-Americans and some loyal white Republicans.31 Two years later, they succeeded in getting a constitutional amendment passed, effectively disenfranchising black voters through the use of the poll tax and literacy requirements. During the 1900 election, Alfred Moore Waddell, former congressman who led the Wilmington Insurrection, called on whites to warn any “Negro out voting” to go home immediately, and “If he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.”32 Nonetheless, slightly over two-thirds of black voters showed up at the polls in 1900. These were scary times, but Hinton, Sarah, and their children persevered. By 1900, at least two of their sons, Jack and Alonzo, reportedly had two years of schooling and could read and write. Eventually all of their children received some level of “common schooling.”33
It was during this period, before the turn of the century, that Hinton made the fateful decision to change his family’s name from Cole to Monk. By the time a Wayne County census taker recorded his family’s presence there in the spring of 1900, they were all Monks.34 Perhaps Hinton was asserting his independence from his half-brother, or maybe he had become indebted to another landowner and had to escape without settling his debt. Whatever the reason, Hinton, Sarah, and at least one of their children eventually returned to his birthplace of Bentonville as Monks rather than Coles.35
Hinton and Sarah chose their children’s names with imaginative flair. They picked Squire, Theodoras (also known as Theodore), Bertha—and Thelonious. “Thelonius” or “Thelonious” is the Latinized spelling of St. Tillo, a Benedictine monk renowned for his missionary work in France in the seventh century, who was kidnapped by raiders and brought to the Low Countries as a slave before he was ransomed and joined the order. In France he is called St. Theau, in Belgium he is known as Filman, and in Germany he was referred to as Hilonius.36 It is likely that Hinton learned a bit of Catholic history—maybe even some Latin—from the school Dr. John Carr Monk established for local black children.
Born in Newton Grove on June 20, 1889, Thelonious (Sr.) began working alongside his brothers and sisters as a boy, as the family tended to livestock and picked cotton in Wayne County. He received some formal education, learning to read and write, and at some point in his young life, he picked up the harmonica and learned to play a little piano by ear. But those moments of amusement were few and far between; most of his childhood was consumed by toil.
As a young adult, he left his parents’ house to join his sister and her husband in Rocky Mount. Many rural migrants were coming to the burgeoning railroad town, in search of steady employment and a decent place to raise a family. He did find Barbara Batts, another rural North Carolina migrant who carried similar hopes. But the financial opportunities the city promised proved to be elusive.
• • •
Barbara Batts, “Miss Barbara,” as she was affectionately called by friends and neighbors, hailed from Edgecombe County, North Carolina’s leader in cotton production, and the heart of the radical Republican Second Congressional District. Edgecombe not only had a black majority during and after Reconstruction, it developed a militant black leadership that fought tirelessly for the social, political, and economic rights of the state’s freed people.37 Barbara developed a lifelong commitment to political and civic engagement (though the Democrats would later become her party of choice), which she would pass on to her children.
Barbara’s maternal grandparents, Henry and Clara (Clearly) Knight, were both slaves in Edgecombe County. Henry was born around 1830 in Deep Creek Township, on a plantation owned by Lucy Knight Batts Barlow.38 Her family’s holdings were quite extensive: She had inherited eleven slaves from her father in 1809, and by 1860 she counted thirty-eight slaves among her household of field hands and house servants.39 Henry worked in the fields, picking cotton and foodstuffs. In 1859, Henry married Clara, a slave ten years his junior, who lived on the neighboring plantation.40 Although their marriage was not legally recognized until 1865, they insisted that the registrar record the correct year they were wed.
Unfortunately, the couple spent most of the war apart, not only because they lived on separate plantations. Once the Union armies entered North Carolina, most slaveholding families in Edgecombe and Nash Counties fled to Warren County—but not Lucy Knight Batts Barlow. Referred to by family members as “Old Mother,” Lucy was a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner who, at eighty years old, stubbornly refused to leave her property, no matter how close the Union troops came. After many efforts to persuade her to move to safer ground, the local Confederate commanders gave up, and she “was provided a detail of Infantry which was quartered in the front grove.”41 Henry and “Old Mother” ’s other thirty-seven slaves had to live out the war years under constant Confederate surveillance while Clara toiled for her masters elsewhere.
It is no wonder that their first child, Georgianna (sometimes spelled Georgeanna), was not born until October 31, 1865. Georgianna Knight was Barbara Batts’s mother, Thelonious Monk, Jr.’s maternal grandmother. Conceived in the last days of slavery, she was among the first generation of children born free.42 Henry and Clara raised Georgianna and five younger children on “Old Mother” ’s plantation, but after her death in 1867 much of the estate was passed down to her grandson Isaac Batts. Henry sharecropped on Batts’s land, and his children helped him as soon as they were old enough. Clara “kept house” as best she could, but when hands were needed in the field they all worked. Nevertheless, Henry and Clara insisted that their children get an education. The 1880 census-taker in Deep Creek reported that three of the Knight children—Georgianna, Blunt, and Emma—had attended school that year.43 Of course, rural schools for African-American children were rarely open more than two months out of the year, but every working minute of class was sacred.
Georgianna’s formal education ended around the time that a farm laborer by the name of Speer (or Speir) Batts took an interest in her. Born in Deep Creek around 1856 to Jacob Batts and Nancy Kay, Speer spent part of his childhood as a slave and never attended school.44 But he was reputed to be an excellent fiddler who played for dances and local community gatherings in and around Deep Creek.45 In Scottish, “speer” means “to ask,” but it was more commonly understood among the English as an old scientific term for “celestial sphere.” As the word was passed down to the younger Thelonious Monk’s generation, the pronunciation (and spelling) evolved into “Sphere.” Thelonious eventually decided to adopt “Sphere” as his middle name, attributing it to his maternal grandfather. (He often joked that with such a name, he could never be accused of being a square.)
There were no career opportunities for black fiddlers in the rural South during the 1870s. Speer was expected to use his fingers to pick and haul coarse bolls of white cotton. When his father passed away in the mid-1870s, Speer, in his early twenties, had to take on the responsibility of caring for his aging mother and younger siblings. Between his mother’s meager earnings as a domestic worker and his wages as a farmhand, they barely made ends meet. In the fall of 1878, Edgecombe farmers endured one of the worst harvests in memory, due to severe drought and global economic depression. Throughout 1879 and 1880, poor black sharecroppers and tenant farmers found themselves in deepening debt, forcing many to take to the road in search of work.46
Speer, his mother, and his baby brother Joshua were among them. But unlike the thousands of other African-Americans who headed to Georgia and Florida to work in the turpentine industry, or west to sharecrop in Arkansas and Mississippi, or sought refuge and opportunity in places like Kansas, Indiana, or even Liberia, the Battses stayed in the county, moving to the community of Conetoe, North Carolina. The town is only a few miles southeast of “Freedom Hill.” Freedom Hill, or “Liberty Hill” as it was often called, was settled in 1865 by a group of freed slaves with the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. A symbol of hope and a model for political militancy for freed people throughout eastern North Carolina, Freedom Hill drew African-Americans throughout the county in search of opportunities and a safe haven against rising white violence.47
They did not stay in Conetoe long, and it appears that Speer’s mother died there.48 Speer decided to return to Deep Creek Township and to ask Henry Knight for his first daughter’s hand in marriage. On May 8, 1884, with the Justice of the Peace presiding, Speer Batts and Georgianna Knight were married. He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, she was six months shy of her eighteenth birthday.49 It is not clear how long they stayed in Deep Creek or what they did to survive. They might have lived for a while with Henry and Clara Knight, who would remain on the Batts place for at least another twenty years.50 But the tendency during the 1880s, especially among younger people, was to leave Edgecombe. Between 1880 and 1890, Edgecombe was one of thirty-five counties that experienced a net loss of African-Americans. By one estimate, nearly 50,000 black people left North Carolina in 1889 alone.51
The catalyst for the exodus was as much political as economic. The Democrats vowed to take the state back under the banner of white supremacy. Besides waging extralegal violent attacks against black civic and political organizations, in 1889 the state legislature passed the Payne Electoral Law, which gave registrars (who were predominantly Democrats) wider discretion to disqualify voters. In an effort to slow down the exodus, laws were enforced that made it illegal for a worker to break his or her contract.52 Speer and Georgianna chose to move out of the county, but they did not go very far. In 1892, when Georgianna gave birth to Barbara, her only child, they resided in Hamilton Township just across the Martin County line, about twenty-five miles east of Deep Creek.53 Unfortunately, Speer died soon thereafter, never having the opportunity to see his daughter grow to womanhood, or to meet his son-in-law, or to play with his three grandchildren. Whatever musical knowledge he might have passed on to little Thelonious traveled in the realm of memory and story.
Georgianna was determined to make it in Rocky Mount and to create a better life for her teenaged daughter. She wasn’t alone. For many rural black folks in the region, all roads led to Rocky Mount. With the erosion of civil and political rights and the deterioration of the rural economy in North Carolina, this rapidly growing railroad and mill town represented one of the few shining beacons in a dark age.
• • •
Nestled on the Tar River where Edgecombe and Nash counties meet, Rocky Mount had blown up in just two decades, from a sleepy little mill town to the largest metropolitan area in the eastern part of the state. In 1890, only 816 people resided in Rocky Mount, many of whom worked in the tobacco warehouses or the cotton mills. By 1910—three years after incorporating as a city—its population had risen to slightly over 8,000. The main catalyst was the expansion of the Wilmington and Weldon railroad, which ran along Main Street in the center of town and marked the county line between Nash and Edgecombe. The Wilmington and Weldon line had merged with several other local railroad lines to form the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (ACLRR). In 1892, the ACLRR established repair and outfitting shops on unincorporated land just south of the town. The Emerson Shops, as they were known, attracted rural migrants looking for work.54
Thelonious, Sr. and Barbara were among them. They made their separate ways to the city around the same time, between 1907 and early 1909.55 They each quickly learned that Rocky Mount was no promised land, especially for poor black people. The city was full of idle black men in search of work, as white men had exclusive access to the higher-paying skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the Emerson shops and the Rocky Mount Mills, the city’s leading cotton manufacturer. The fact that both Thelonious and Barbara were literate and had some formal education did not matter.56 Barbara and her mother, Georgianna, did what virtually all employed black women did for a living: domestic work. Georgianna took in laundry while Barbara worked as a housekeeper for a private family.57
The city had yet to establish a public high school for black children, so her daughter’s education was informal at best.58 Yet Georgianna’s middle-class aspirations are apparent in the first photographic evidence of her and her daughter. Peering through round spectacles, Georgianna looks slightly down into the camera, lips pursed, threatening a smile. She is wearing a slightly tattered but delicate dress with a sheer bodice. Barbara stands beside her, a little distant, her bright eyes wide open. She shares her mother’s high cheekbones, smooth dark-brown skin, and small stature. (As an adult, Barbara would stand at five feet, four inches.) Roughly sixteen in this picture, Barbara wears a long-sleeved virginal white dress, reminiscent of an old-time baptismal gown.
Georgianna and Barbara rented a small house on Pennsylvania Avenue in a respectable black working-class community that straddled Edgecombe and Nash counties. Respectable, but poor. Appropriately named Crosstown, the community lay adjacent to the black business district on the Edgecombe county side (or west side) of the railroad tracks. Crosstown stretched eight blocks to the east of Main Street and six blocks north from East Thomas Street to the city limits, where many residents were able to maintain gardens and keep pigs and an occasional milk cow.59 There were a number of churches in town, and much of Rocky Mount’s social life centered around its religious communities. Both women were devout Baptists.60
Between work and worship, and with a fairly strict mother, Barbara had very little time to socialize. But at some point, between 1910 and 1913, she met the attractive young man with the most unusual name of Thelonious. Dark-skinned with deep-set, piercing eyes and strong African features, Thelonious Monk was three years Barbara’s senior and not a whole lot taller than her (contrary to later myth). According to his draft card, he was “short” and of “medium build.”61 Thelonious resided in South Rocky Mount in a black neighborhood known officially as Gibson Hill but more commonly as “Around the Y” (or “Around the Wye”), a community of mostly railroad workers and laundresses who lived in small two-room section houses. African-Americans in Crosstown and Happy Hill in the northern part of the city tended to look down upon residents in South Rocky Mount, partly because of its reputation for crime, vice, and violence, and because there were very few churches and schools in that part of town. The upstanding and pious folk from Around the Y usually went to the northside to attend church.62
Thelonious was one of several Monk children who left their parents’ sharecropping for the promise of the city. Around 1908 or 1909, Thelonious moved into a house at 112 Dunn Street with his older sister Eulah, her husband David Whitehead, and his younger sister Hettie Fernandez Monk. A relative named Sampson Monk owned the property initially, and he later willed it to their brother Theodore “Babe.”63 In 1910, Hettie was thirteen years old and attending school, Thelonious was nineteen and worked for the railroad as a common laborer, and his brother-in-law was employed as a fireman for the ACLRR. Three years later, their youngest brother Squire joined the household, and Hettie’s education came to a halt, as there was still no high school for black children in Rocky Mount. Hettie became a domestic worker.64
When Thelonious began courting Barbara Batts, she was young, pretty, hardworking, deeply religious, and lived in the better part of town, despite the fact that she and her mother were quite poor. They married on August 20, 1914.65
Thelonious moved out of the Whiteheads’ place. With his new bride and mother-in-law, he rented a small house at 815 Green Street, also called Red Row, just a couple of blocks from his brother-in-law’s house on Dunn Street.66 For Barbara and her mother it was a step down. The house they moved to was not only small but, like the houses on Dunn, was so close to the railroad tracks that they had to accustom themselves to the noise of locomotives pulling in and out of the city en route to Norfolk. (Thelonious Jr. would develop a fascination with trains, and their music.) At least, at age twenty-five, Thelonious was finally independent. Despite indecently low wages, Thelonious and Barbara earned enough so that Georgianna no longer had to take in laundry.
Just a year shy of fifty, her health was already declining. Georgianna probably stopped working in the early months of 1915 when Barbara was expecting her first child. Unfortunately, the baby died soon after birth.67 Within a couple of months of her loss, Barbara was again pregnant.
• • •
On January 18, 1916, the Monks called for Lucy Cooper, the neighborhood midwife who learned her skills in slavery, to come to the house, and that afternoon she delivered a beautiful baby girl named Marion Barbara Monk.68 Thelonious and Barbara struggled to support their growing household. Thelonious made very little money as a non-union manual laborer for ACLRR. Whenever his services were not needed, he was out of work. Perhaps for this reason, when the Selective Service Act was passed in 1917 in preparation for the U.S.’s entry into World War I, Thelonious lied to make himself more attractive to the draft board. On his draft card, signed June 5, 1917, he recorded his birthdate as June 20, 1892, taking off three years, even though Barbara was five months pregnant with their second child, Thelonious, Jr.69 There was significant black working-class opposition to the draft and to entry into a war for democracy abroad when African-Americans did not enjoy democracy at home. Yet many poor black men throughout the country saw the military as both a regular source of income and a means to escape the vagaries of domestic racism. Many hoped working for Uncle Sam and donning the uniform of federal authority would ensure that they would be treated like men.70
Despite the application, Thelonious failed to be drafted. Few black men were accepted into the segregated army. Just a couple of months after filling out his draft registration card, Thelonious lost his job with the ACLRR and began working as an “ice puller” for the Rocky Mount Fuel and Ice Company.71
By most accounts, this would have been an inauspicious time to have another baby. But to the superstitious or the devoutly religious, the circumstances of Thelonious, Jr.’s birth was a sign of good things to come. On October 9, Rocky Mount experienced one of the worst storms in decades.72 By daybreak the storm had moved out to sea and the clouds cleared for a gorgeous autumn day. That evening, October 10, 1917, Miss Lucy Cooper helped deliver Barbara’s first-born son.73
Thelonious, Sr., was happy to have a son, but the stress of work and financial instability took its toll on him; his health began to deteriorate even before he turned thirty. He suffered from asthma and related respiratory problems, and his work was irregular. Georgianna’s health did not improve either, and so much of the burden of caring for the family fell on Barbara’s shoulders.
• • •
During that final year of World War I, the city experienced massive food shortages due to wartime demands, not to mention a terrible outbreak of influenza during the fall of 1918. In the month of October alone, Rocky Mount reported fifty-eight deaths caused by a devastating strain of the Spanish flu.74
The Monks dodged the flu, but their struggles worsened. Barbara became pregnant again in the spring of 1919, and on January 11, 1920, Lucy Cooper was called over for a fourth and final time to deliver Barbara’s youngest child, Thomas Monk, who would carry the nickname “Baby” his entire life.75 A few weeks after Thomas’s arrival, the Monks moved into a slightly larger home across the street at 814 Green, presumably with a higher rent. Thelonious, Sr.’s employment had not improved, and Georgianna’s kidneys began to fail. Barbara had to stop working altogether to care for the children, as well as for her ailing mother. To stay afloat, the Monks took in boarders, an employee of the Emerson shops and his wife, who also worked as a domestic.76
Despite these and other hardships, the Monk household was filled with laughter and plenty of music. In later years, Thelonious told interviewers that neither his mother nor his father were musicians, though his definition of musician referred strictly to those who made a living playing music. As he explained in a 1963 interview, “My parents were not musicians at all, and I am the only one in the family to have gone in this direction. . . . My mother sung in the church, but that does not count.”77 Whether it counts or not, the truth is both of his parents played a little piano. Barbara learned to play a few hymns by ear, and Thelonious, Sr. knew a couple of songs that he loved to play in a rollicking, ragtime style. His main instruments were the “Jew’s harp” and the “blues harp,” better known as the harmonica. Like most Southern harmonica players, he deftly imitated train whistles. “My father was gifted as far as music was concerned,” Thomas Monk recalled. “He never had the opportunity to study, but he was gifted, really. He just had the ear for music.”78 Thelonious and his siblings also absorbed the music of the church. Besides attending church every Sunday, the kids listened to their mother—and possibly their grandmother—singing and humming hymns and gospel tunes in hushed tones around the house. Thelonious would later record some of the sacred songs he heard as a child, notably “Abide with Me,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “We’ll Understand It Better, By and By.”
Barbara, the only healthy adult in the house, faced a decision in 1921, as her mother’s kidney problems advanced beyond repair. For the past decade, over one million black southerners had decided to leave their rural homes and substandard, segregated schools, heading to the urban North and its promise of freedom, opportunity, and even the right to vote. The Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South swelled the populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other cities.
When Georgianna Williams died on October 30, 1921, just one day before her fifty-sixth birthday, Barbara’s decision loomed large. The cost of Georgianna’s medical expenses left the Monks with little money for a proper burial. (Like many poor Rocky Mount residents, she was laid to rest in the city cemetery.)79 Thelonious, Sr.’s health had worsened. His own father had died in May, leaving his mother, Sarah Ann, and brother Lorenzo, thirty-four, unmarried, and apparently unable to care for himself, at home.80
Finally, in the spring of 1922, Barbara contacted her cousin Louise Bryant, who had relocated to New York City several years earlier. Barbara and her three children were joining the Great Migration. On some unknown day in June of 1922, the Monks rose early and made their way to the train station, three children and overstuffed bags in tow, to catch the 6:33 a.m. “West Indian Limited” to New York. 81 Thelonious, Sr. moved whatever was left at 814 Green Street to a small house at 120 Dunn Street.
Thelonious Monk, Jr., age four, would not be a Southerner after all.